


Deliverance

by deslea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fic, Fidelius Charms, Secret Keeper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 08:25:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7969519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deslea/pseuds/deslea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the most dangerous man in the world wants your wife, her most dangerous secret is that she loves you.</p><p>  <i>Cursed Child spoilers.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Deliverance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for HP Dark Arts Back To School fest 2016. It was an own prompt for the theme _Secret Keepers._. More info at the end.

You are her hiding place.

You are her safe haven for the secrets she cannot trust with herself. You take the things she can afford to tell no one, and hold them for her so she no longer can. You remove the burden from her shoulders and take it upon yours.

This is the gift of the Fidelius Charm. The gift of deliverance.

She tells you her secret, again and again, because you are the only one she still can. She tells you in whispers, tells you in gasping breaths in stolen moments. Tells you the thing she hardly _ever_ told you, back when she thought the words would always be there to tell.

She loves you. More than anything. More than _everything._ You know it's true, now, because she risks everything to hold into it. To hold onto _you._

You are her Secret Keeper, and her secret is you.

 

* * *

You watch him unravelling her mind.

She resisted him, at first. Not with her body, of course; neither of you thought that was an option. But with her mind and her heart, yes. She fought for you. She fought to stay _yours._

Would he have given up if she hadn't? You wonder it in your empty bed. You wonder, if she had let him just possess her completely, would he have grown bored and cast her aside? He has done it before.

But she didn't. Perhaps couldn't have, even if she had known she should have. She isn't built that way. She had been a challenge, and he covets her now like a hard-won toy. He picks idly at the threads of her mind, barely even realising that he's doing it, you think. He picks at them just because they're there.

You wonder it again when she finally joins you, her eyes wild and her laughter wilder, her scent tinged with things male and metallic and oddly sour. She was always the passionate one, the one to take a stand and hold it to the end. She was a fanatic in the making, and she has become a fanatic for _him._ To you it seems like her mind's effort at self-defence. To have been there unwilling would have killed her long ago, and so her mind has manufactured the will.

You wonder it yet again when his grip on her mind finally fades some hours later, when she rises in the night to wash him away, and crawls back into your arms, quiet and pale. When she says she loves you, like the night before had never happened. Like these witching hours, where secrets may be spoken, are the only ones that are real for her. Perhaps, you think, they are. 

Perhaps they are her hiding place, like you.

You stop wondering when she strokes your hand, running fingers over your wedding ring, her eyes haunted, her expression grave. You stop wondering because you know _she_ is wondering the same, and whether this will be the time you turn away.

You don't. You won't. If there is anyone you cannot forgive, it is yourself. You had the reckless audacity to love, knowing you were part of this life, this world. It is you who put her in harm's way.

You stop wondering and kiss her. You let her cry out her secret to the heavens as you draw out the part of her she hides away. You anoint her insides with you. You release her, over and over, until she forgets to wonder. Until she forgets everything but you. You grant her deliverance all over again.

At last, the witching hour leaves you, as it must, and the cycle begins anew.

  
[Witching Hour](http://deslea.deviantart.com/art/Witching-Hour-Bellatrix-Rodolphus-632883398) by [deslea](http://deslea.deviantart.com/) on DeviantArt.

 

* * *

You listen numbly when he tells you she will bear his child.

There is a prophecy, of a child who will become his saviour, and so a child there must be. Today, she will take the potion. Tonight, the child will be created. You will not touch her afterwards until the pregnancy is confirmed.

You say the things you must say to save both your lives. You speak of honour, of how it pleases you raise a child of his lineage in your house. You speak of the pride you have to be trusted with this task. You pledge with your life that you will protect the child and share the prophecy at the proper time.

He watches her take the potion, and he leaves you, well pleased.

Both your masks fall as a flicker of wards tells you he has left your lands. You turn to one another. Her face is a rictus of anger, of refusal, and so is yours.

She launches herself at you, half-whispered demands filling the air, to have her now, while you still can. To make this child yours. 

You do. You love her, but it isn't love. It is deliverance. You do it to keep him out of her, deny him the only part of her you still can, deny him his saviour. You fill her with your seed until her body seals you in and seals him out.

You know you cannot hide this from him, this victory, so she delivers you, too. She becomes your Secret Keeper as you have been hers. Shoulders your burdens as you have shouldered hers. 

Your burdens are his true children, begotten against your will and laboured into birth in your world. But if they are his children, they are also hers and yours together. They bear his face, but they draw and hold you to one another, an island on which you both can stand.

You cannot deny him all his children, but you can deny him this one.

 

* * *

Your secret is tearing her apart.

You see it in the lines of her face, in the darting of her eyes. Too many years with him have stretched her sanity thin, left her too broken to carry a burden like this one. One day, her back will break, her shoulders will give out, she will let your burdens fall.

He will kill you both, and your child as well. He will kill her last, and make her know what her weakness, for which she cannot be blamed, has done.

You deliver her, as you have always delivered her. You let her have one single night with you and the daughter you share, one single night as mother and father together, and then you Obliviate the secret away.

You Obliviate her love for your child with it.

The child is blameless, you tell her, but she cannot let down her guard with the child anymore, now that she believes the child is _his._

You love the child as best you can, without either her or _him_ seeing, but it isn't enough. Soon, she stops crying, stops seeking the love of others, and relies coldly on herself.

Within months, the child is more like _him_ than like either of you, and you realise you didn't deny him after all.

 

* * *

In death, she is finally yours alone.

She dies with him, but it doesn't matter, not really. She was stretched too thin between the life she wanted and the life she had to ever be put back together again. If she had outlived him, it wouldn't have been for long. Some burdens are too great for anyone to carry. You know that now.

You deliver her from the final insult of being buried with him. It means trading your cooperation, and ultimately your freedom, but you do it. You do it by telling her secret, telling it freely at last: _She was yours, not his._ Veritaserum bears your story out, and they let you see her decently into the Lestrange vault, a space for you ready at her side.

Your child is traded too. She is the sacrifice, the thing of yours that became wholly _his_ so you could deliver her mother. No one will ever know she was yours, not unless they connect the long-distant silver-twined hair of your ancestors with her. The secret died with the Secret Keeper who no longer knew it herself, and so you can never tell. When she comes to you, as cold and remote as her would-be father, you can only tell her the fanciful story of her birth that you Vowed him you would tell. There is enough Slytherin in her from your bloodline and her mother's that the story appears to be borne out, and it is never questioned again. The truth will die with you.

She fails in her prophesied role, though, so perhaps it wasn't in vain. She still became his daughter, but she didn't become his saviour. Perhaps you denied him, after all.

Perhaps, through her, you delivered the world.

 

* * *

Your own deliverance is slower in coming than you would have liked.

When it comes for you, though, it is glorious. She comes for you, as _whole_ as she was before it all began. There is lightness in her bearing, her eyes. The fracture of her is gone.

It is the witching hour, where secrets may be spoken.

She speaks your name, and she delivers you at last.

END

**Author's Note:**

> I've realised that the link to the Hogwarts theme of the fest is probably not completely clear (which can be a problem with own prompts). The roots of the idea were in Rodolphus going to Hogwarts to claim Bella's body, towards the end of this story. It's a scenario I've played with in art, and I also have a quite different version of it in a story in progress in the Bellatrix/Voldemort series Fusion. So although the Hogwarts connection was pretty mild on the face of it, in my own mind it was very vivid.


End file.
